When My Time Comes

There were moments of dreams I was offered to save I live less like a workhorse, more like a slave I thought that one quick moment that was noble or brace Would be worth the most of my life.

At first the subject of the song speaks about a great event he sees coming in his life. His chance to be a hero and "save" something But he discovers that he does not end up being a workhorse because being a workhorse comes with a reward and he discovers that he is enslaved by the very idea of this dream to be a hero. This dream to be a savior and be significant. He thinks that he is living his life for "one quick moment" that's off in the future and will last him forever. This reminds me of Emily Dickinson when she says "forever is composed of nows". I think it's an allusion to the Dream that we are all pursuing the future. We are all suffering (enslaved) through our nows so that the 'moment of defining' or our "coming of age" story will be great and spectacular but in reality we're constantly living in the future which inhibits our ability to take action NOW.

So I pointed my fingers, and shout a few quotes I knew As if something that's written should be taken as true But every path I have taken and conclusion I drew Would put truth back under the knife.

The second stanza seems to be the character's reconciliation with the fact that people have gone through what he has before. I don't see this as a Biblical or religious allusion but rather a more overarching philosophical allusion. I think it's the idea that every religious, spiritual, or philosophical path you use to make sense of the world has its own shortcoming. You can shout all the things that people have said before but in the end they were humans just like you and when you go down these roads long enough you'll want to question these things and really try and understand if they are true for you.

And now the only piece of advice that continues to help: Is anyone that's making anything new only breaks something else.

When my time comes, Ohhhhh, oh oh oh. When my times comes, Ohhhhh, oh oh oh.

I think that the narrator feels hopeless about the fact that he doesn't know what's true and so the only thing that helps him is the fact that bringing in his own viewpoint of it all will at the very least break down old stigmas and tired sayings. The chorus feels like that voice inside our head that sees the future as something better than our "now"(recurring theme). It feels like at first he wants to make a bold new statement of his own so he starts off "when my time comes" but in reality he's just crushed that he can't make sense of it, so he passes off a few oh's as if to say "I'm still trying to figure that part out, man."

So I took what I wanted and put it out of my reach I wanted to pay for my successes with all my defeats, And if heaven was all that was promised to me Why don't I pray for death? And now it seems like the unraveling has started too soon, Now I'm sleeping in hallways and I'm drinking perfume And I'm speaking to mirrors and I'm howling at moons While the worst and the worst that it gets.

So the narrator goes about his new task of finding out what he'll do when his time comes. He decides that since he lives a life that has forced him to suffer he will now willingly suffer for it by taking what he wants and putting it out of reach. He begs the question why we don't just pray for death if something better is ahead of us. This is a question he asks because the notion of it detracts from being able to live in the "now". If we can't live in the now why don't we pray for it to come? Then it feels like things start to get away from him and everything happens too fast. He's become out of place by sleeping outside of bedrooms and drinking something (presumably for internal resolution or beauty) that's supposed to be meant for external beauty. And he's talking to himself in the mirror because he has gone down this path alone and has only himself to talk too, and he's howling at moons because he has become alone and isolated like a werewolf. He feels cursed and outcast. All at the same time things are just getting worse and he's had no new epiphany.

Oh you can judge all the world on the sparkle that you think it lacks. Yes you can stare into the abyss, but it's staring right back.

Then he says that you can go do what I did and criticize this world for what it didn't have and you can stare at the "abyss" of the world, but all it does is stare right back at you unchanging in it's ways.

Then back to the chorus. Back to the idea that he's still lost throughout all this change. He still doesn't know how to fix it so he keeps singin about this unclear yet better future.

I think this song is about growing up and how we all forlornly escape the present to the future. We have a very structured world with governments, and religions, and ideologies and at first we think that those things will grant us an opportunity to be great. Then we start looking at all the bad things or "side-effects" so to speak in the world and make out our own way towards self-discovery and greatness. And it all results in the futile efforts of finding meaning. So we keep singing about how the future will be better if only to escape the reality that we don't know how that will happen.

The idea of this song is something commonly expressed in books, movies, tv, songs and all types of art but Dawes does it in an incredibly moving and almost heart-wrenching way. Great song. I really dig it. Hope this helped.